The initial version of the Campaign Finance API offers overall figures for presidential candidates, as well as state-by-state and ZIP code totals for specific candidates. In addition, the API supports a contributor name search using any of the following parameters: first name, last name and ZIP code.

We believe that steps like this are going to prove key if big media is to thrive in the future.

We concur. This is a great first step for The New York Times, and we hope that it will be the first of many APIs released by the traditional media company. According to the Times Developer Network site, the next API in development is a Movie Reviews API (our Movie Reviews API profile) that will give you access to movie reviews by New York Times critics. It will be interesting to see if other newspapers and media companies follow suit. As we have seen, NPR has moved forward with its own API and just today DayLife released an enterprise API for publishers. How important will APIs be for news organizations going forward? These new business models are something Jeff Jarvis has been thinking about, see these slides on New business models for news for an upcoming summit at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. And since this NY Times API mixes news and politics, if you are interested in campaign finance, you can check out the Follow the Money API for data on state level campaign data, as well as 30 other government related APIs.

[...] After launching a series of interesting and useful APIs since last fall, covering everything from campaign finance to movie reviews, they&#8217;ve now released their most important API to date: their Article Search [...]